Tag: policy

Stimulus 101

Posted on by lhl

I’ve been otherwise occupied this month, so I’ve only had a chance to keep an intermittent eye on the Stimulus Plan and its development. One of the things that I was a bit disappointed to find is that despite the copious amounts back-and-forth prattle coverage and the much better ongoing discussions in the economic/biz blogs that I follow, that I couldn’t find a really good single page/resource for describing in simple, understandable terms what’s happening to the economy and why economic stimulus is needed and how the plan will help.

One of the first places I went to was WhiteHouse.gov and the complete failure in communicating and selling the stimulus plan on there, especially coming from my experience on the campaign, was a (surprising) failure on the part of the Obama administration. And, while I think that this past week has been much better with the President’s recent WP op-ed and tonight’s press conference (video), I think that having a good, concise one-pager would still be an enormous benefit.

It’s one thing to talk about a full-blown crisis, but an image like this (posted Friday on Nancy Pelosi’s blog) makes things much clearer:

Job Losses in Recent Recessions

(Here’s a version with job losses from all post-WWII recessions, although I don’t know if they’re using consistent measurements)

Also, from a understanding macro-economics or fractional banking perspective, I think that there’s a pretty big gap in terms of understanding what’s going on (about 3min in to hear about the details of the bank run):

For me, the things I’d be most interested in are the economic projections (job losses? GDP shortfall?) and accessible breakdowns of the stimulus plan effects (hint: a 100pg PDF is not the ideal format), the effects of the infrastructure investments, and comparisons of tax cuts vs direct spending:

Fiscal Stimulus Bang for the Buck

Lastly and perhaps most importantly I think is that spotlight on the economy needs to force us to talk about and address the huge structural problems that we’ve been ignoring – sustainability of growth, consumption, income inequality, etc. Here’s a video of Robert Reich discussing some of this:

While I’m disappointed that neither the MSM nor the Stimulus Plan backers have done something like this, it’s occurred to that this is the perfect sort of project some good designers to tackle in conjunction w/ either some of the economist bloggers that have covering this stuff or some of the civic groups out there. (Just saying.)

(FWIW, I recently started reading Krugman‘s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 which has been pretty interesting so far. For those looking for a better idea of how our money and our economy works, Chris Martenson’s Crash Course is good (and depressing) start. The Wikipedia entry on the Economy of the United States is also a good place to start surfing.)

Recently Reading

Posted on by lhl

I’ve long been a fan of Andrew Leonard’s blog (my favorite on Salon by far) but lately I’ve been especially enjoying his posts (it’s a shame there isn’t a public feed reader that really takes into account the ebb and flow of post-level reading patterns), which have focused on the economic meltdown. Here’s a list for example of the posts I particularly dug from this past week:

And that’s just the standouts since last Wednesday.

For those of you who have even a passing interest in the economipocalypse, PBS’s Business Desk w/ Paul Solman has also been quite interesting. Here’s a great piece on how the collapse has affected trade (via):

Open Sourcing and Improving the Citizen’s Briefing Book

Posted on by lhl

The formatting got a little messed up (no paragraphs!) for my posting, but I’ve left my 2-cents for the Obama Administration for my thoughts on implementing and improving future participatory online tools.

If you’re so inclined, give the posting a look (and vote or comment on what you think). The Citizen’s Briefing Book project closes at 6PM today, so if you want to put anything up, now’s probably the time to do it. (there are almost 50K entries so far – that’s a lot of internet rantings to sort through 🙂

Also, a copy of what I posted (w/ paragraphs):

Open Sourcing and Improving the Citizen’s Briefing Book

The Citizen’s Briefing Book was a great project and I’d like to commend everyone involved. I’m looking forward to seeing these experiments with participatory tools continue with the Administration at WhiteHouse.gov.

This is an area I’m particularly interested in, so my suggestions pertain to the meta-discussions that have popped up around improving the Briefing Book (voting bias, aggregating and surfacing related ideas and discussions probably being at the top of that list). While the suggestions themselves point to specific weaknesses in the current implementation, I believe that they more importantly highlight the larger opportunities of generating useful discussion, analysis and direct involvement in improving future participatory online tools.

I’m aware that most government IT is contracted out, but the development of these online tools should perhaps be an exception, both because of their strategic importance to the government and the people, but also for the more pragmatic reasons of their development intensiveness and the deep, fast-changing, and often esoteric expertise required. As talented as agencies like Reside, or Blue State Digital are, many of the most difficult challenges exceed the capabilities of any single group and would benefit from tapping into a much larger pool of motivated technologists.

While, MyBO (which, full disclosure, I worked on last year) and Change.gov were campaign or pseudo-governmental projects, as “government works,” the new WH.gov projects would provide a great, high-profile opportunity for the new Administration to embrace an open process, not just in publishing the source code, but by actively encouraging participation and engagement with distributed source control, open APIs and bulk data access, and dedicated discussion and feedback loops. Furthermore, it’s my belief (based on my observations and experiences within the high technology and the Internet) that creating a transparent and level playing field would also serve to encourage the best and brightest in industry when it comes to contributing infrastructure and other resources that would be required for any sort of serious online undertaking.

There are many talented people working on political tools, and many great third-party non-profits (Sunlight, Maplight, MySociety, to name a few) working on data transparency and other aspects of digital government, but when I look at the challenges facing the development and scaling (in both technical and social interaction terms) of what may eventually be the most transformative of new online democratic tools–those for radically distributed policy deliberation, agenda setting, and direct involvement–it seems to me that fostering an open approach would do much to spur development with tremendous benefits (and almost no additional cost) for all parties, not least of which would be the American people.

Notes on the development of the Citizen’s Briefing Book app:

Ignorance Is Strength

Posted on by lhl

The SF Chronicle had an interesting article, Venture capitalist says U.S. losing green race, on a policy briefing held in Congress today. Here’s the paragraph that jumped out at me (emphasis mine):

Doerr was invited to speak by California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the committee, along with Friedman, the author of a new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” which calls for a green tech revolution to solve the country’s climate, energy and foreign policy challenges. They spoke at a policy briefing, not a formal hearing, but most of the committee’s Democrats stopped by. None of the panel’s Republicans attended, a sign of the continuing partisan split on Capitol Hill over how to address global warming.

Now, I’m far too jaded to say that I’m honestly surprised, but read that again, and reflect that the context of this discussion was not climate change per se, but rather, a policy briefing on the country’s lack of competitiveness within the new global order:

Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is betting billions on clean energy technologies, told senators that two of his firm’s biggest investments were with foreign firms because U.S. companies did not have the most advanced technology. Of the top 30 companies in solar, wind and advanced batteries, just six are U.S. firms.

“Notice the trend here,” Doerr told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “We won the space race with the Soviet Union. Now as (New York Times columnist) Tom Friedman says, we’re in an Earth race with other nations to see who can invent the technology so that men and women can stay on Earth. And we are not winning today.”